he stands on his back legs with his front feet hanging over the gate and he starts to sing.

first that fat boy: jedi, joins in, followed by squirts ear shattering soprano…then bambi 1 and nicky and benny and june and bear…soon mystic is heard from the far away dog room and then the rest of the bed buddies start..before you know it every dog in the house is singing in odie’s early morning choir rehearsal and odie is in the full glory of a wild and spontaneous dog song surrounding him.

damn wanna-be wolf dogs and their love of wild and eerie music…..and at dawn fer chrissakes….why not at noon?

today is it…i am going to try to get dixie into a crate and into the vets. i think we will be euthanizing..she is too sick to get better on her own now and she is too feral for any ongoing treatment like giving her daily medications. i am not sure i will be able to get her into a crate but i am hoping i can….hope floats too that she is not too horribly freaked out by my intervention in the end of her life.

when i moved dix from my family home to the first saints site…i emptied a bedroom of everything except the bare walls and carpet. i placed a trap in the center of the room with food and water in it and i rounded her up and chased her into the room and shut her in. it took 4 days until she was desperate enough for food and water to go into the trap. i could hear her crying pitiously for days and it broke my heart.

when we moved from the first saints site to here, i asked one of my friends from the spca to come and catchpole her because i wanted the horror of her terror to be over as quick as we could. i can still hear her screams but it was over in minutes and i was able to rush her to our new home and set her free really quick.

since then, i promised not to ever bug her again..she has her friends in the cats and i make sure she gets access to the canned food that she loves by making the staff and volunteers put out a wasteful amount of canned food that will last all day and into the night. cuz i know dixie will not charge in and eat with everyone else when people are in and out back there. those bowls still needed to be full when everyone was gone for the day and the cats had eaten their fill. then dix could ccome out and eat in peace and not find only empty bowls left waiting for her. nothing upset me more than to come home at the end of the day to dixie crying at me cuz the canned food bowls were all empty. i didn’t care that it made some of the gluttonous cats fat with 24 hour access…dixie was never to go hungry.

i am having such a hard time with this…11 years of trying so hard to follow her rules not to upset her and today i am again breaking the big don’t touch one. i can deal with our animals ending their lives, all living things will eventually die…i just am weak when it comes to having to violently participate in it…like radar, like clyde…now with dixie. radar and clyde, cut me a break and with drugs were able to somewhat cooperate…and dixie can’t do this for me.

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lynne says

i was just wondering why some animals that are feral can be somewhat tamed and others like dixie will not after years of living in the same place. why do they not learn to trust. i would think that they would know they are fed and taken care of and will eventually come near you somewhat. i guess andy is the same way, but at least he knows where the food is and is not left out of that. what a shame that they could have so much more and can not because of their fear. so sad.

I’m sorry about Dixie, but I’m pretty sure she wasn’t an unhappy cat living in a house of so much love and understanding.

I’m always touched by how much you think about what the animals want and need instead of what you (the human) wants. So often we expect our animals to change and act like we want instead of thinking of what they really want or need (mostly out of ignorance I think).

Saturday night we raised a record $56,700. It takes a community to build something worthwhile. Saturday evening a community, bonded by love of the crippled crew at SAINTS, came together. The staff, volunteers and especially the crippled crew thank our community. pic.twitter.com/mPqt…

Willow passed away.
He had surgery earlier this week to remove a large bladder stone. He seemed to be recovering well but this morning the staff discovered he was unsteady and twitchy. He died within a few minutes. He most likely suffered a stroke and threw a clot, poor boy. pic.twitter.com/be3F…